November 14, 1999

By TOM GOLDSTEIN

WHAT ARE JOURNALISTS FOR?
By Jay Rosen.
338 pp. New Haven:
Yale University Press. $29.95.

his book describes the 10-year history of a hotly debated if slightly fuzzy experiment, variously called public or civic journalism. Its advocates want to transform how journalists report on campaigns and public issues by paying greater attention to what ordinary citizens say they are interested in -- a notion that has been hooted down in news media centers in the Northeast but embraced in places like Wichita, Norfolk and San Jose.

Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism and mass communications at New York University, has been a prime advocate for public journalism, and in a sense ''What Are Journalists For?'' reviews his own work. Rosen quotes himself a lot, he discusses his lapses (he turns ''people off by coming on too strongly''), but mostly he relates his intellectual journey.

Following the depressing 1988 election, the audience for serious journalism seemed to be shrinking and Rosen was among those who felt politics had become a slick, cynical spectacle, taken over by the candidates' handlers. He turned to John Dewey and Jrgen Habermas. In contrast to Walter Lippmann's disdain for the public and confidence in experts, Dewey felt that given the chance, people were capable of making their own decisions. Habermas too, drawing on Enlightenment thinkers, argued that citizens, aided by a free press, could decide what directions their affairs should take.

Rosen translated these ideas into public journalism, a project that means vastly different things to different people. Its most ardent supporters have taken on the trappings of evangelists. Its detractors have denounced it as a fad, a gimmick, a commercial ploy or an idea that was not new at all.

His work helped to persuade many news organizations that citizens whom they frequently polled were entitled to have candidates talk in depth about what was on their minds, not necessarily what the candidates wanted to address. In another example of public journalism, The Akron Beacon Journal, after reporting on the racial divide in its community, aggressively asked readers to do something to help solve the problem. In 1994, the newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize for public service ''for its broad examination of local racial attitudes and its subsequent effort to promote improved communication in the community.''

For many of the country's leading journalists, the idea of public journalism rings false. Rosen quotes Leonard Downie, executive editor of The Washington Post, who has argued that public journalism oversteps the bounds of good reporting ''by forcing candidates to participate in dialogues with voters, by staging campaign events, by deciding what good citizenship is and force-feeding it to citizens and voters, by pressuring citizens to register and vote when, as I say, nonvoting can also be viewed as an honorable and honest way to participate in the democratic process.'' Influential journalists from The New York Times have been more scathing. In a signed Editorial Notebook article, Howell Raines, The Times's editorial page editor, said James Fallows's much-discussed 1996 book, ''Breaking the News,'' posed an ''insidious danger, and that is that reporters and editors become public policy missionaries with a puritanical contempt for horse-race politics.''

To its detriment, public journalism lacks a precise definition, a deficiency Rosen readily acknowledges as a constant source of frustration ''to reporters who grasped the goals and caught the spirit of the movement, but wanted clearer guidance on how to proceed.'' In recent years, its momentum has been slowed. By 1997, Rosen noticed that the phrase ''public journalism'' was disappearing from use ''even in the newsrooms where the idea had been most influential.''

Whatever its future, in a period where journalism is rapidly changing -- with interactive news, 24-hour news and instant news -- what Rosen offers may not be the ultimate cure for journalism and public life. But his book is a valuable addition to a meager list of books that take journalism seriously.

Tom Goldstein is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.